Royal Flush
by pause
Summary: In which Lucy turns to her love life for literary inspiration and searches for suitors to use as her muse. Natsu is not a muse, and he is not amused.


Writer's block, Lucy mused, was a voluntary sort of paralysis.

 _Well, that's a solid sentence of prose right there._ Her fingers noncommittally danced across her typewriter as she willed her mind to cough up some more.

Magnolia, for once, was free of calamity. Never in any stretch of her overactive imagination had she thought this to be possible. No fires, no villainy, no cat stuck up a eucalyptus tree.

No, her only problem was the blankness of the parchment in front of her. It had exasperated her for hours, and that was a record even Natsu had yet to best.

* * *

(a day prior)

Lucy was paging through a catalog, her fingers ghosting over pictures of Chantilly lace dresses and corsets. Had she not slapped destiny in the face and fled the Heartfilia coop, she would certainly have been touching the lace with her fingers rather than through a magazine spread.

The sound of Levi's voice broke her reverie. "Say, you're back. I'm back."

She hummed a noise of agreement as Levi continued on. "And work is slow. Do you feel like reviving our writing challenge?" Her friend was nursing a yogurt cocktail and thumbing through a yellowed paperback a seat away from her.

"Oh, Levi, not this again… You know we never make it past ten pages together."

"Right. Our styles just clash but—"

"Well, it's not just that. I'll insert a sidekick, an adventure, but next thing I know you've concocted a love octagon."

"Hyperbole. And that was only last time. I thought you would have appreciated a dose of romance. You appreciate men enough in real life." Lucy rolled her eyes and playfully attempted to set Levi's glass down. The girl was a touch bit buzzed, and it was evident in the flush on her cheeks.

"I find harems hard to write," Lucy jokingly quipped. She eyed a pale, Cinderella-blue frock shining translucently in an advertisement. It was almost the same cut as one of her adolescent favorites. It was also the same price as her rent. Right. She moved on.

"There was _no_ harem. But anyhow—how come I never see you writing romance? Where are your tall, dark, and handsomes?"

Lucy pouted and snatched the alcohol away from Levy for a sip. "I can _so_ write romance." If she could capture the frost of Gray's stalagmites in adjectives and replicate the vivacity with which Erza charged in adverbs, she could write romance.

"Okay. That'll be our writing challenge then. You want to prove it to me?"

* * *

(present)

 _Okay, maybe my writing has stagnated_ , Lucy thought. Her most consistent keystroke in the last half hour had been to hit backspace. The few other keystrokes had produced two plain-Jane characters and an incorrigible plotline.

She was about to bash her forehead against the mahogany of her desk when she sensed the latch on her kitchen window come undone. Alarm thrummed through her veins. Her self-preservation instincts had her fingers looped around her key ring in a second.

But her apartment was not under attack—her ill-stocked refrigerator was.

Natsu.

 _(three punches, two round-kicks later)_

"I can't believe my partner is a refrigerator thief. A real hero-protagonist."

"Protagonist? What?"

"Nevermind."

"Say, next time can you buy some ham—" Lucy leveled him a tart glare that muted his request mid-sentence. She shuffled back to her desk, and Natsu interpreted her turned back as consent to rifle through the rest of her almost vacant pantry.

"So what are you doing?" He had located a half-finished loaf of mixed nut bread and already inhaled a slice of it by the time he popped up behind Lucy. He peered at her inky typescript, skimming without comprehension. When it came to prose, he might as well have been illiterate.

Lucy blushed, her cheeks adopting the faint pink of Natsu's hair. _Surprised me._ She ignored the idea that it could have come from his sudden proximity.

"Just writing the next _Magnolia Times_ bestseller." Natsu nodded as he chucked another sugar-crusted slice of bread into his stomach. Lucy didn't have it in her to chide him to at least pretend to chew, not while his eyes were still roaming over her manuscript. And the less carbs for her the better—she had magazine spreads to pretty up for.

"'Bout what?"

"A romance." Her admission was nothing embarrassing, but for some reason she felt self-conscious. Only with Levy had she ever disclosed anything relevant to her writing.

"What's the inspiration behind that?"

"Hm? What do you mean?" She momentarily made eye contact before her gaze decided that the edge of her table was far more amusing.

"Usually, your writing is inspired by something. Like our adventures." Really, Natsu had no sense of personal space. The wool of his scarf and the dissipating heat of his breath tickled her cheek.

"Oh, well. This one's a romance, and I have plenty of expe—" She stopped herself short, mid-epiphany. Had it really been half a year since her last wine-and-dine?

"Hmrf?" Natsu questioned, obviously still in the process of digesting her future breakfasts. (He owed her a bakery run.)

She rewinded through her memories, through the spurned suitors that cropped up every city, the one-sided flirtations that went ignored, and— _good lord_ , the gold digging she had ignored to literally chase for gold.

In the last season, she had thrown herself into job after job, not pausing for even one romantic interlude. It wasn't as if men didn't lay the charm and charisma on thick with her. Yet somehow, she had failed to spare anyone (herself included) a romantic evening.

Perhaps, she mused, it was time to work a different sort of magic.

* * *

"I really don't understand this card game." Natsu's outstretched finger pointed accusingly towards the deck spread out on Fairy Tail's beer-stained bar top. He was on Lucy's right, watching Mirajane organize a hand of cards.

"There's nothing to understand, Natsu, because this isn't a card game," Mirajane explained as she set the last King card down. Lucy had requested romantic help and she was ready to try a new method of matchmaking.

"Hush up. Mira, could you explain it again?"

"Sure thing, Lucy. So you pick up a hand of these face cards. If any of these guys catch your eye, you tap the card and it'll absorb your magical signature." She made a tapping gesture an inch above a Jack of Spades to demonstrate. "Somewhere in Magnolia, if these guys are taking note and are interested in reciprocating, you two can decide on how to proceed."

"For example, this is Renaldo, Jack of Spades, Man of all Trades. He sounds rather pleasant." Mirajane introduced a man with auburn hair in a trim suit who winked at Lucy from the face of the animated card. Lucy's face did not mirror Mirajane's excitement.

"Or Yuzhen, King of Hearts? His hair has that princely part, and it says in the margins that he's looking for someone adventurous." Lucy squinted at the teasing smirk projected from the King card. Her reaction to him was lukewarm, but she made to tap on him anyways.

She hesitated for a second, as if she was waiting for some hotheaded declaration from Natsu to declare the whole business a farce.

But no such objection came, and she tapped on the King of Hearts. Passed on the Ace of Spades. Tapped on the Jacks of Diamonds. Natsu simply watched, a bored expression pasted over his sharp features. Every few cards, Lucy would sneak a peek at the way he was passing the time. He had taken to teasing Happy, blowing warm gusts into his fur at random intervals. In between, he would gulp down more ale in an invisible contest against Cana.

Very briefly, she imagined what she would have done had he been a card in her hands. She shook the far-out thought away and resumed her card appraising.

* * *

(meanwhile, a side conversation)

"I thought that you were the heaviest endorser of whatever's between Flame Brain and Lucy." Gray intoned as he leaned over the splintering bar top. He and Mirajane were a few paces away from Lucy's matchmaking station, an activity that had started to attract some attention much to Lucy's chagrin. Levy was eagerly trying to peek over her shoulder, and Ezra demanded that Lucy show her hand so that she could ascertain the quality of these distant bachelors.

"Gray, what makes you think I've abandoned ship?" Gray didn't like the way Mirajane's steel blues were twinkling. It was as if she knew something he didn't. Which was true, because for one, she knew that he had yet to register that he had abandoned his trousers.

"You're kind of extinguishing whatever's there if you're steering her towards other men." Paces away, Levy waved a King in front of Lucy's face, Lucy stuttered a "maybe", and Natsu gave Happy another surprise blowdry.

"No, Gray. I'm igniting something. Just put on your trousers, wait and see." And with that and an enigmatic smile, she headed back towards the mayhem with a fresh-filled keg.

"Ugh, fuck. My pants."

* * *

(three days later)

There was a break-in before her first date. She was stabbing a pair of pearls through her piercings when she heard her window slide up into a collision against its frame.

She hardly flinched, but she did curse. Natsu was definitely bad for her self-defense instincts if a window intrusion didn't even make her bat an eyelash.

"Natsu, there's a front door." She hollered as she self-consciously appraised her bird's nest of a hairdo. Her hair was wound into cocoons around a set of rollers she had inherited from her mother.

"But that's no fun." She could hear the pout in his voice more clearly as he bounded towards her room. She nudged the bathroom door closed. It wasn't as if he was unfamiliar with her state of undress, but she really wasn't about to have him appraise her haphazard bathrobe look. "Where are you?"

"I'm stuck in the bathroom." She snatched a swab of toilet paper to start blotting away some excess lipgloss.

"Why? Was it the tiramisu from earlier?" Lucy snorted—boys and their verbal diarrhea.

"No and seriously, who asks that kind of thing?" There was a silence at the end of the door, so Lucy assumed Natsu had moved on to ransack her kitchen. She could imagine the wolfish grin that would undoubtedly surface on his face once he noticed the pack of honey-roasted ham in her refrigerator.

After she ran a brush of rosy powder over the apples of her cheeks, she stepped backwards to evaluate the dolled-up woman in the mirror. Her eyes were framed in clouds of shimmer and sparkle, and her lips were painted in a natural shade she imagined was inviting.

Her date was an hour away. There was no need to step into her dress just yet, but she did so anyways. It was a pink slip with a hem that cascaded asymmetrically about her knees. Lucy realized she looked stunning—stunning had taken her two hours to prepare. She made her way towards the kitchen, where she could catch a glimpse of Natsu peeling back a container of ham. His back was to her, and she realized belatedly that the baby pink hue of her dress coincided with the shade of his bedhead hair.

"Luce, you smell different." She rolled her eyes as she heard him seal away the scent of meat and whiff. That had better not be what the King of Hearts told her tonight unless he wanted to make an abysmal first impression.

"Turn around and see." He cocked his head backwards and raked his eyes across her form. She searched his eyes for judgment, for a lingering stare, for anything—she wasn't even sure herself what she was looking for.

(In romance of both the real and fictional variety, this was supposed to be the scene where the man was awestruck, paralyzed by the physical metamorphosis of the girl-now-woman. "You look", they would gulp, "stunning!"—to which the archetypical girl-now-woman would reply with a shy, saccharine smile.)

But Natsu was never one to follow the cultural script. "Yep. You look real nice." His tone was casual, but the sincerity was apparent. As he turned to face her, he caught the gentle smile he had teased out of her all the same.

An hour later she couldn't help but feel that as packaged and as witty as her date's compliments were, they were shallow echoes of Natsu's sincerity.

* * *

Two weeks later, in an attempt to actually recuperate from a mission for once, Lucy tapped a Jack of Diamonds for a dinner along Magnolia's harbor. Along the margins of their matched cards, they planned an evening under a blanket of stars sipping sangria and watching boats leisurely float by.

Unfortunately, "fancy" was not a look Lucy could afford in a variety of colors and cuts, and seeing as she never arranged to see the "King of Hearts" again, she unapologetically repeated her prior date night look.

As she stabbed the pearls through her piercings again, she waited for the sound of a latch to break. As she tickled her nose pink with powder and gradual irritation, she listened for the sound of a window unlocking from the outside. As she unwound her hair from their spun roller cages, releasing a flutter of blonde curls, she waited for the footfalls of a familiar intruder.

As she left out a pineapple bun and flicked off the lights to her apartment, she waited for Natsu.

She felt as if someone had plucked at her heartstrings, but she couldn't pinpoint why. She was en route to a date; there was no reason to feel stood up.

* * *

He didn't stop by until the day after.

"Oh, was your date yesterday?" He nodded his head toward the pink frock discarded over her ratty, floral sofa chair.

"Yeah," she muttered. She didn't particularly feel like recalling it, lest the awkwardness of the whole affair somehow resurface again.

"How was it?" The mattress groaned under his weight as he face-planted onto it. He idly waved around his arms and legs, making a human snowflake, and she wondered if his dog of a nose ever sniffed out the way her sheets absorbed his smoke and spice scent.

"Meh."

"Mirajane told me to tell you…" Lucy didn't catch his next fragment; it came out as an unintelligible warble, muffled by the foam of her pillow.

"Say that again?" As Natsu was making a mess of her sheets by himself, she had busied herself by tidying the perimeter of her room, tucking tubes of mascara and lip tints back into their rightful compartments. She rehung her pink slip, preparing it for hibernation in her closet.

"That I could pass you another few cards you know. If you want them." At his slowly and unenthusiastically spoken words, she stopped attempting to shove her pink slip into the back of her closet. He fixed his gaze upwards at the peeling stucco ceiling, refusing to meet her eyes.

She didn't know how to respond, but she knew she shouldn't have thought about that her previous date earlier. His awkwardness was a contagion.

She took a beat too long to respond, so Natsu bulldozed on. He sat up now, back propped against her wall. "Why are you looking so hard so far away? Aren't there cool enough people around you?" There was a current of cool anger imbued in his question, one starkly different from his usual battlefield fury.

"I'm just testing the waters, Natsu." They were both aware of how weak of a response that was, but he stopped pinning her under his earnest stare nonetheless and bounced off her creaky mattress. He headed towards her kitchen and Lucy sat on the spot he had just vacated.

When Lucy stepped into an untouched kitchen later, she surmised that this must have been the first time Natsu had come and go, subtracting nothing from her pantry or refrigerator. Rather, this time, she noticed that he had added something.

A hand of slightly bent cards was sloppily spread over her ceramic kitchen top.

* * *

The document in front of her remained empty: empty of words, empty of inspiration.

Lucy glanced over at the cards splayed next to her typewriter. She slowly flipped each card face down after glimpsing the sort of enigmatic man each one promised. They all looked like safe, pleasing choices, but they weren't the person she was searching for. The one person who had always made her feel safe.

None of them had the roguish, defiantly pink hair or the omnipresent smirk that had so often set her heartbeat (and blood pressure) on fire.

 _"Why are you looking so hard so far away? Aren't there cool enough people around you?"_

But then she wondered if it was the writer in her searching for meaning where there was none.

* * *

In their next mission, the topic of their previous conversation was not broached. They dispatched the minor villain haunting the townsfolk with minimal effort and synchronous teamwork. Camaraderie and teamwork always went hand in hand.

Lucy was not sure where romance could squeeze in in that equation. She was sure it was not a mutually exclusive concept, but she would rather not be the one to crumble the solid foundation of what they had together, so she tabled her mixed feelings for another day.

Upon arriving back at their inn, they found a home-cooked feast waiting for them, a gesture of appreciation whipped up by the townsfolk. It was an extravagant meal for two, a pot of still boiling broth and steaming side dishes. A small, boxed desert was set aside with an envelope of remuneration taped to the top.

"I can taste the appreciation." Natsu remarked, sipping the first ladle of chili-spiced broth. Lucy could too, as she tried a spoonful of the tofu and scallop. It melted in her mouth, and with every spoonful she could taste more and more of the coastal delicacies hidden in each bite.

"Is it better than the flames you just ate? If you keep this up, you might get a belly." Natsu was already polishing off some appetizer plates of pickled vegetables and beansprouts.

"I'll never get a belly. Let's do an experiment. You can feed me five meals a day, and we'll see what happens."

"When will you realize that I already do?" Her chopsticks fished around the broth for some rice cakes, and as she deposited some back into her bowl, Natsu spooned her some fish as well.

"The fish is so tender and _good_."

"But at least one of us has to watch their waistline." The mixture of briny, soy sauce broth and rice was going to bloat her for sure.

"Your waistline is great already, jeez."

To prove his point, he made to drown her rice in another ladle of sauce, but Lucy moved her bowl just out of reach. "Ah ah ah—no you don't."

"Too much salt?" As if to remedy that, he slurped down half of the sauce, splattering an oily dribble on his chin. He outstretched his palm for Lucy's bowl again. She mock-gagged, setting down her bowl to lean over and swab away the dark drops by his chin. A tiny smile bloomed on her lips.

"Too gross for the princess?"

"Oh yes."

It was then that she realized that even if every meal onwards she had to watch Natsu near-choke on fish bones in gluttonous haste, even if she had to constantly watch her plate for stolen bites, she didn't mind.

* * *

Upon their return at Fairy Tail, Mirajane was put to work with a celebratory round on the house. Bubbly overflowed from every cup into overzealous gulps and messy bar top puddles.

When she finally had a moment to catch her breath, she stopped by the stools Natsu and Lucy were occupying. Unsurprisingly, they were mid-bicker.

"Don't forget the tuna. You know how much Happy likes tuna."

"Why don't you do the grocery shopping, then, punk?" Lucy's flash was flush with mock-indignation and booze glow.

"Hey, you have to admit. I did the bad guy in more this time around."

Mirajane guessed this was as good of a time as ever to insert herself. "That's very cute." She suppressed herself from asking, _how was your honeymoon_?

"What's cute?" Natsu said, brashly ignorant.

"Hey Mira. It's been awhile." Lucy turned her attention towards the mage as well.

"Yeah, it has. You never told me how those cards worked out." She rested her forearms over the bar top, innocently and offhandedly posing her question.

"To be honest, most of them didn't." She feigned surprise, as if that wasn't the answer she was expecting from Lucy.

"But I think I do have sparks with this one guy though," Lucy slowly admitted. Now this was an unanticipated development for Mirajane. Perhaps she had produced an unintentional roadblock.

"Oh?" Mirajane's curiosity was echoed in Natsu, who openly stared at her. The heat of his stare was beginning to transfer onto Lucy's cheeks. Lucy resolutely kept her attention on Mirajane.

"Yeah, but I'm not really sure if I've read the signals right."

"Have you reached out through the cards again for another date?" The air around them had begun to warm, and it wasn't from the usual stuffiness of overcrowding and body heat.

"But he's not in the deck." Lucy tossed her beaten leather purse onto the stained bar top and rummaged around for the cards. She located them and passed over all of them to Mirajane, who didn't even glance at the rejected, well-packaged men.

Seeing as Fairy Tail's mages had a sixth-sense for action, a few within earshot shuffled closer, like moths to a flame. Lucy nervously toyed with the wine glass in her hands as she continued.

"He's more of a wild card. A joker. And just like how you don't play with jokers, you don't mess around with him, because he's a hell on the battlefield."

"He's a terror to our antagonists, but honestly, sometimes he can be a terror to us all." She sighed as she went on, making eye contact with a bemused Erza. Gray, hovering at the fringe of the action, also gave a knowing smirk of agreement.

Perhaps it was the liquid courage speaking, or perhaps it was raw gutsy impatience taking over, but she couldn't contain her words anymore. "But what I've come to realize recently is: he also brings me—us—Fairy Tail—such warmth and loyalty. And I've begun to feel some sparks for this guy."

There was a beat of silence as all eyes migrated from Lucy to Natsu.

"So…who is this bastard?" The room positively deflated—Natsu was density defined. Of course, Lucy would confess to the entirety of Fairy Tail before her words made it through to him.

"He's denser than I am." Lucy amended, palm massaging her forehead.

"Then tell me who he is. So I can punch some sense into him."

"That would be golden." She rolled her eyes and finally absorbed the amount of stares her little speech had garnered. The temperature in the room was already punishing enough, and she needed to escape both the heat and their attention. She tugged her rucksack over her shoulder and grabbed Natsu's wrist, heading for some privacy under the stars. Trailing them, she swore she heard a few catcalls and a low whistle from Cana.

The streets were empty of observers. Outside, it seemed as if there were only Lucy, Natsu, and the heavens. However, the silence was only momentary, as Natsu blurted, "So who is it?"

Lucy exhaled a deep breath and before she turned and looked straight at him.

"It's you." But Lucy knew Natsu, and she knew he was a man who spoke through the medium of actions rather than the language of words. So she decided to confess in a way he would best comprehend. She fluttered her eyes shut, closed the distance between them, and pressed her lips to his.

Under the winking constellations, his surprise melted into a dizzying eagerness to reciprocate, and she counted her lucky stars.

* * *

 _Their kiss was a war of passions, a stalemate she was sure would be one of the few non-victories he would be perfectly complacent with. Her hands wound around his back, grasping her partner—in every of sense of the word—close._

For now, Lucy concluded, her romance—both off-script and on-paper—was a work in progress.

* * *

AN: Thanks for reading and please review. 3


End file.
